/biz/ - Business & Finance

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do it if you want to go into academia. otherwise it’s completely useless unless you have a math phd and become a quant on WS. everything else only leaves you with academia jobs.

Dont do it

I'm thinking of doing a geology PhD, but it's gonna cost me 5 years of my life. I want to settle down.

Are you in mineral exploration? Do you have a master's? Most people I know hated their PhD by year 3.

>>11939802
I have a pretty huge dick

>>11939878
>Geology PhD
>Settle down
Pick one

>>11939802
not all phds are equal. if the administration doesn't give 2 shits about quality you can pass off with a thesis that the average highschooler would make, and most of the time they don't, because why care when you can rake in money by selling people useless degrees, even at the phd level? so reminder that education is a business, not actually there to make you smarter as a person

>>11940194
Also this. If you're already got a bachleors in geology though you're doomed to a life of imense riches but you're gonna get divorced at some point for never being home. Might as well double down and do fieldwork for the USGS which is a little more exciting than coreshacking
t. Coreshack robot #2043

>>11939802
Are you gonna use it?

>>11939802
BUMP

just applied for CSE PhD... should i do it fags

>>11939878
my geology professor offed himself with a shotgun

>>11940941
Only if youre a nigger, woman or (jackpot) a nigger woman

PhD student here. Only do it if you truly love the subject and if it is in your character to self motivate. I like being my own boss and my mind is always stimulated. The only downside is the low pay, but, it’s the sacrifice you make to do what you love. Plus once you have a PhD you open up career paths for well paying jobs if you don’t want to be an academic.

>>11939802
Durden sums up Gen X pretty well with that quote. Like, spot on actually.

What about a PhD in mathematical physics? How easy is it to get into Wall Street for the money as your plan B, assuming you managed to get 50-100 citations at the end of your PhD and would have good prospects in academia?

>>11939802

3 letters
2 of the are 'upper-case', whatever that means

>>11940983
You're lucky to live in an era of prsoperity. Chaos and uncertainty is bad for everyone. Grow up

>>11939802
Less than 1% of people on this planet have phds and their iqs are above 140 in general. You sure you fall into this group?

We can debate the degree itself and title.
However, skill-wise, PhD is total BS you don't learn no useful skills aside from sucking professors cock and begging for grants.

It has a 50% chance of making you an insufferable prick.

A PhD is the most bluepilled thing to do in 2018. I don't care what it's in. Fucking torture paid peanuts to be a beta all your life. All guys doin PhDs come out beta and mentally ill

>>11941620
Retard.

>>11939878
>spend 4 to 5 years living in abject poverty in order to study rocks
>your reward is to work for an oil company in the middle of fucking nowhere

Sounds like a shit idea, desu

>>11941064
>wages stagnant for 40 years
>massive student loan debt bubble fueled by the government de-risking loans by disallowing discharge through bankruptcy
>declining home ownership due to a decade of speculation with cheap Fed money
>millennials poorer than their parents
>”era of prosperity”

>>11939828
/thread

>>11941031

>>11939828
Just to add to this: you do want to go into academia. If you can carve out a niche, get tenure, and run a lab, you can get super /comfy/. You may not like decisions that the school board makes, but corporate America is a dumpster fire of boomers who ruin companies because they realize that their climb up the ladder never made them feel satisfied. They lash out, take all the profits, and give useless orders and wonder why trading their life to sell commodities feels so empty.

In academia, you will have a stable career peering into the details of a field of science answering questions that you, yourself want to know or trying to build something that you designed as an engineer. You would be the primary driver of human innovation while the rest of the world leeches off of you.

>>11941836
>>11941836
Seconded. What a complete meathead!

Is a Philosophy PhD worth it? How competitive are academic Philosophy positions? I want to do academia I have no desire to work in the private sector.

>>11942275
Academia in fake subjects like philsophy is so competitive because there are hundreds of plebs like you who all want to avoid """the real world"""

there's a big chance i'll receive a scholarship to do a phd. not much money, but enough to live by decently + university fee exemption

desu i have a moderate interest in my field, but i'm considering to enter it just to wait for the golden bull of 2020/2021

if you need to pay everything by yourself and work while doing a phd, not worth it. or you must be crazy passionate about your field. lots of people underestimate how tiring the whole shit is

>>11941064
there's nothing prosperous about this era, you stupid faggot. uncontrolled migration, rising taxes, corrupt government, creeping socialism, rabid niggers, rabid feminism, out of control inflation, destitute millenialls that can't afford rent, high cost of living. You grow up.

>>11942286
>fake subject
Woah slow down buddy you don't wanna destroy millennia of Logic, Aesthetics, Ethics and Math just like that, do you?
>>11942298
You should never be paying for a PhD, it's not an achievement to get a "scholarship" to do it.

i'm doing a physics phd and everyday is torture
I'd probably have killed myself by now if I hadn't made a bunch of money in the bullrun

>>11939802
Non-science - worthless.

Science/math related - job security.

>>11941620
>>11941836
>>11942354
>>11939802
Second year social science PhD here. I'm aiming for a non-academic job. Can't wait for my fourth and fifth year when I'll no longer have classes.

Wages are SHIT. Treated like a slave by faculty (as a TA, if your tuition is covered and you're paid a shitty stipend). After tax, and rent, I have almost NOTHING left. Studying is 24/7. There are no free weekends or evenings during semester - you study all the time, and even then there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.

Say goodbye to your social life, hobbies, family, gaming, and your relationship.

>>11942333
i'm getting a scholarship for my living expenses too, tho. literally my daily life covered, even though it's as i mentioned enough to live by, not splurge

>>11942523
Idk what country you live in, but that's normal in the US. Congrats on getting into a program at all though

https://www.theatlantic.com/article/576769/
>Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People's Mental Health

>Ph.D. candidates suffer from anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation at astonishingly high rates.

It's basically cheap skilled labor

Should I get my PhD in chemistry or give up on my degree and learn programming instead?
I'm from leafland btw

>>11942716
100% this. All my colleagues suffer from extreme stress, and anxiety. One guy had a mental breakdown last semester. Many people cry throughout semester.

>>11939802
Post hole digger?

>>11942236
>You would be the primary driver of human innovation while the rest of the world leeches off of you.

Leeching you off the money you would get if you commercialized that stuff... Even considering that, it still might be an acceptable trade-off for dealing with less BS in academia.

>>11942716

On one hand I don't want to go through a PhD due to my already kind of poor mental health, but on the other hand I have to escape from this SW development wage cucking with Scrum and trying to get into a sort of industrial R&D and for that a PhD really comes in handy in order to be decently paid... What fucking do?!

>>11939802
Useless its a math phD

>>11943491
If you're in your 20s and can secure funding, do it, but you have to be passionate about the subjects you study. If you're doing it just for status or 'just because', then you're better off without. You cannot survive a PhD without determination.

>>11941620
>>11941836
>>11942002
>>11942354
Phd's are for the most part coping retards who cant actually do anything so they live their entire lives in the academic circle jerk doing their pointless bullshit "research" getting mcdonalds tier wages working 90 hours a week whilst acting like smug fucks meanwhile no one gives a fuck about their paper

>>11939878
Just go get the most lucrative job you can find. My cousin went the PhD route. One day he added up that he was making $8/hr at 35 yrs old. I had a house, a wife, a boat and this poor sap was making what I made when I was in high school.

>>11943942
>no one gives a fuck about their paper
literally no one gives a fuck about your research and if they do they'll just steal it

>>11942236

Get your PhD if your finances (by which I mean your family's) allow it. Just get a doctor to prescribe you Prozac up front, it'll save you some grief down the line.

When you inexorably get tired of not being able to make rent on your own, you can always join the great Corporate adventure and become a code monkey like the rest of us.

>>11943491
This was my core issue as well. Can’t tolerate SCRUM BS. At the end dropped out of PhD, took a complete career pivot (already had a master of Statistics) and moved into Nutrition. Comfy job and focus on family and investment at side.

>>11940255
>education is a business
This was the conclusion that I came to at the end of my MA. Probably could have had a full ride as a PHD but I was so disillusioned with academia and the whole degree mill thing that I cut my losses and walked away. Students these days are paying customers, it doesn't look good on the program or the school if people are failing. It's why they work to discourage thesis dissertations and want more coursework from PHDs these days: more time doing TA work for free, less likely you flop your 120 page unsupervised essay.

Having said all that, if you can grind it out, get a position, get tenure, its probably one of the cushier professions. But only if you like it, only if you like reading and grading and marking and lecturing and the department politics and dealing with all the student grade grubbing and bullshit. Not to mention the temptation of fucking young hot students that look up to you.

>>11939802
I'm in a PhD course. No real reasons really, I was indifferent between an average engineer job after my masters or going in a PhD so I went for the latter for meme reasons:
(1) To correct people in situations like "Mr. Anon?" and I'd reply "Doctor Anon."
(2) to go 100% in academic degree
(3) same reason as (1) but so I can check the "Dr." instead of "Mr." on airplane reservations

Tbh even if I went straight into engineering, I'd have applied to R&D jobs. With a PhD I might have more cred to take a project in charge.
You also get "Wojak Anon --- Ph.D." on your business card. And if I decide to make my own startup company for whatever reason (which I wont because I like technicalities more than smooth talking and pitching), being a Ph.D. makes you a big brain in the nomies eyes so they assume you know what you're talking about more than if you were an average joe. This is especially true when you consider the degree inflation and how easy it is to get a master degree these days, even in technical fields.

I don't know if what I just wrote is relevant to you, but that's how I cope with my choices anyway.

>>11941100
bruh, I usually score between 150~155 and I'm quite stupid really

>>11944975
>Not to mention the temptation of fucking young hot students that look up to you.
This is unironically why I never got into academia even though I was a beast Lit student and my professors all said I should have gone to the next level. But I'm a tall handsome dude and I'm also a massive horndog. There's just no way that I wouldn't be fucking those young girls left and right and there's no way I wouldnt get snitched on and fired. I have no clue how any man could resist that temptation it is the most sexually charged scenario imaginable.

>>11944912
Oh hey NutritionistAnon! It's me, the anon who though you were Michael O Church.

>currently in first year of humanities PhD
>praying I'll make it with my Link stack by 2022

>>11939802
Not worth except you really love doing research.

>>11945839
It feels good to be around you anons who thinks in similar frequencies.

>>11942236
R&D engineer here, I've worked in academia and in manufacturing, applied R&D is definitively more interesting than academia.

Very useful thread. Thanks biz

>>11945116
>(3) same reason as (1) but so I can check the "Dr." instead of "Mr." on airplane reservations
My nigger. I have a great PhD position with 100% salary at my national space agency, but the reason why I even bothered searching for it was exactly that.

Also in germany there are so many forms where you can choose Dr. instead of Mr. or Ms. Its like your some sort of überbeing.

>>11946596
Doesn't germany has tons of doctorate degree names too?
Like Ph.D. is for theoretical science, Dr.Eng is for applied sciences, and some other things for literature? I remember a german guy telling me something along these lines.

>>11942275
I got a PhD in philosophy just before the financial crisis. Things were pretty bad before, with typically 100 applicants for an open position (i.e. specialism not specified) at reasonable universities. In 2010, after the hiring freeze stacked several years worth of fresh academics high in a holding pattern, an open position at Austin attracted over 300 applicants. It is an ultra competitive subject and probably less than 10% of PhD students end up with a secure academic job. Even if you do, you normally have to be willing to move state/country every couple of years for the first 5-10 years until you land a permanent position.

If you really want to do it, you need to ignore the shit about 'doing this because you love the subject'. Taking that approach will set you up for failure. You really need to approach it as a career. That means studying specialisms that are in high demand (business ethics, environmental ethics, historical specialisms etc) because fewer people are really interested in them. If you focus on, say, metaphysics, you will just be digging yourself into a deeper hole. Publish often and early, so you have a CV already by the time you finish your thesis. Above all, do your post-grad work in a top program. If you study at the University of Bumfuck, Arizona, you will get nowhere, not even the dreaded community college jobs.

In short, take a long hard think about it. You can make a success out of it (I did for a while) but the things that make it easier to succeed are also the things that make being an academic pointless in the first place. If you're going to give up your real interests to get ahead, why not just work 80 hour weeks in an industry that pays properly and doesn't have vestiges of medieval employment models.

>>11940982
>>11942236

My sides the blue pills in this thread
Yes, the professors at the very top are super /comfy/. But that's not (You)
These spots are reserved for Goldberg and Shekelstein, or rarely , some well connected WASP.
You will be fucking lab grunt, with no life along with with Asians being bombed with impossible deadlines and endless paper pushing.
Top kek PhD being your own boss lol.
The worst choice for White man or Asian.

>>11944912
are you a biz meme now?

>>11946626
Kind of. Its like this:
Dr. rer. nat. is for natural sciences, Dr. med. for medicine, and so on.

But we dont have Dr. Eng. Before we had a bachelor / master system with had a "Diplom" system and the Diplom worked liked the way you described it. There was for example Dipl.-Ing. for having a diploma in engineering.